Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/186

 178 BARONY AND THANAOE April From these passages it is clear first that when Bracton said of a man that he had a court, he meant that he had the justiciary rights known collectively as sac and soc, toll and team, and infangthef, that is to say, that he had the right to hold pleas of theft, provided that the accused had been taken on his land in the act or with the stolen goods on him ; of bloodshed, provided it were not also charged as a breach of the king's peace ; of cattle- maiming, and of debt, as well as the right to have a prison ^ and to hold a view of frankpledge (iii (2). c. 10) ; and secondly that all barons had these rights, as did some others — archbishops, bishops, abbots, and earls — whose barony was overshadowed by a higher office (c. 16). For Bracton, therefore, as for the writers of the earlier law-books, barony must have been an office to which were attached the rights of public justice that belonged to a hundred or wapentake court, the rights of sac and soc, toll and team, and infangthef. Well might he describe barons as ' potentes sub rege ' ! Britton and Fleta, covering the same ground as Bracton and writing from the same point of view — that of a justice of the king's court — ^though a generation later, by themselves add nothing to our knowledge of barony and barons' courts ; but if we com- pare their treatises with the ' Court Baron ', a court-keeper's guide written about 1268, they throw valuable light on both. As Maitland pointed out in his introduction to the ' Com*t Baron ', the court dealt with was literally the baron's court {curia baronis) and not the court baron of the sixteenth -cent my lawyers. Rather it was what these called a court leet, that is to say, a hundred-court in private hands ; ^ for comparison with Britton (c. 29) and Fleta (ii. 52) shows that the jurisdiction of this curia baronis — which included infangthef and bloodshed, both admitted to be pleas of the Crown * — was identical with that of which Britton says (c. 29), * that which before the sheriff is called the sheriff's tourn is in the court of a free man (Jraunk home) and in franchises and in hundreds called view of frank- pledge '. Hence we conclude that at the end of the thirteenth century, as at the beginning of the twelfth, to have the view of frankpledge, to have infangthef, to liave a liberty, and to have a baron's court were one and the same ; and therefore that to say of a man that he was a baron or that he held by barony was but to say that he had over the men of his barony the justiciary rights that were the essence of barony in Normandy. ' ' Si sit aliquis qui de concessione domini regis talem habeat libertatem sicut sock et sack, tolnetum, team, hinfangthcfe ct utfangthefe . . . qui tales habent libertates, habebunt prisonain suam de talibus, quia possunt tales in curia sua iudicare' : Bracton, iii (2). c. 8.
 * Maitland, The Cotirt Baron (Selden Sot-.) ; cf. Hcamshaw, Led Jurisdiction.
 * The Court Baron, p. 68.